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In this week's episode we cover a slew of news from WoW's, War Z's beta and pricing, Daniel Erickson's departure from BioWare, and more. Plus, in our community spotlight, we talk about whether Auction Houses are killing the sense of community in our MMOs.

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Final Fantasy XIV had no auction houses at launch.

It was absolutely horrendous. :(

When faced with strife or discontent, the true nature of a man is brought forth. It is then when we see the character of the individual. It is then we are able to tell if he is mature enough to grin and bare it, or subject his fellow man to his complaints and woes.

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Mabinogi has player shops and a form of auction housing. Interestingly enough most people go the way of player shops because of the ability to negotiate on the cost of items and players can become well known shop oweners.

I think anyone who has played a mmo with player shops can say that player shops are definitely more community friendly than auction houses. However, I don't realy think auction house hurts the community but it just doesn't help it ether

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FFXIV still has no auction house and its always been full of antisocial mutes.

Now FFXI had one for as long as I can remember and as far as "community" goes you couldn't get a more active game.

The AH does not hurt the community, the community does.

You're actually able to buy anything in the wards through a single outlet now; it's as much a auction house as anything else, save for how annoying it is to put items up for sale in using the market wards.

At present I make about 200,000-500,000 gil a day through the auctions with most of my disciple of the hand crafts maxed out. :3

Though it is a pretty elitist community full of introverts or elitists who are rumored to find and use exploits without punishment. I agree that a community is at fault for itself, and auction houses have nothing but benefits when it comes to full-fledged MMOs. It doesn't belong in games like Diablo III, in my opinion and just cheapens the experience.

When faced with strife or discontent, the true nature of a man is brought forth. It is then when we see the character of the individual. It is then we are able to tell if he is mature enough to grin and bare it, or subject his fellow man to his complaints and woes.

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I wouldn't go as far as to say that auction houses kill communities but i would say that they don't promote it. Auction houses are faceless and swift. Yes they are convenient but there is no sense of trade and interaction.

Back when I was first discovering mmos I started off small. Endless Online had everybody standing in either the town square or the bank in Aeven city and people would always be negotiating prices and showing off their new wares. It was such a huge part of the game that an Aeven with no trade between players was no Aeven at all.

R.O.S.E online had cute player stalls where you would click the stall and buy the goods that way, but it encouraged market communities of players all setting up stalls next to each other, and this could happen anywhere, as stop off points in quest zones or the towns themselves.

I think its a great way to encourage players to socialize and as mentioned in an earlier post, become fairly well known and established within a community.

I'm all for an AAA game without an auction house. So long as it is a sandbox too.

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I used to like the way SWG made use of Player run shops. There were several vendors who speciallized in specific items. It was a treat to go to these locations to do your shopping and to see how they were developing their business.

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are auction houses killing mmo community? no.

I welcome real cash transactions (like D3), and gem trade for gold (like Wrathof heroes, GW2,FF,Eveonline) Many of us have grown up-graduated college and gotten jobs , therefore there isnt a luxury of time to be spent griding for things=thats not gaming thats griding!. the fact that you can still get all these items ingame , it harms noone mmos are a living ever changing live community-so it evolves constantly, maybe in 5 years from now i will disagreewith this into something new-who knows but for now it works!

the days are far gone were i stood in middle of ogrimar hanging out doin nuthing but showing off my latest shinny from a 25man guild dungeon run...

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Who else remembers when the alternative to auction houses was shouting in a tunnel? The tunnel in the East Commonlands.

There are a lot of things I loved about EQ in those days, but this isn't really one of them. I had a hard time getting a hold of anything I wanted, a hard time selling things I wanted to offload, and generally speaking, if I wanted to participate in the economy at all, I had to sink a huge amount of effort into it because I had to learn a lot of information that was specific to my server. There was some community involved that has been lost with auction houses, but the cost was disproportionate. It simply required too much effort and knowledge for players to effectively conduct commerce.

As for player shops...that's not particularly different than a well-designed auction interface, since it simply results in people having to travel all over the place in order to buy and sell things, rather than interact with a single interface. It's no more personal or community-building to go to a person's shop out halfway between Britain and Trinsic in order to interact with their shopkeeper NPC in their house. You rarely actually met the owner of the shop, you just had to wander out into the wild and dodge PKs until you got there (well actually you probably had a recall rune marked near the shop, but that's beside the point). In an auction house, if you want to converse with a seller of an item, you do have their character name listed there. Want to try to bargain, or set up a deal? Go right ahead! It's entirely possible.

MMO players these days don't really want forced community anyway; they demand that as much as possible be soloable. If it's not soloable, they demand ways to automatically form groups to do it. These are all ways to avoid forced community, and they exist because players want them. Any bringing 'community' back to MMOs is going to have to be done in a manner that encourages players to act in the desired manner. It will not be achieved through removing options; players will choose to play other games instead.